Many moons ago, Brendan ‘PlayerUnknown’ Greene, the creator of iconic battle royale game PUBG, announced the remarkably ambitious Project Artemis – a title that would use procedural generation to make Earth-sized worlds for huge sandbox experiences. A precursor called Prologue, a survival game that would be an early test bed for the tech in Project Artemis, was also revealed. However, we haven’t heard much about PlayerUnknown Productions’ upcoming games for a while. That is, until now. The studio has unveiled a three-game plan that will help it perfect the various core aspects of Project Artemis, and that all begins with Prologue: Go Wayback! which launches next year. There’s also a new tech demo called Preface: Undiscovered World that is available to try on Steam right now.
Before we dive any further into Prologue and Preface, let’s have a quick refresher on Project Artemis. As mentioned, PlayerUnknown Productions wants to create an enormous, Earth-sized world that can be uniquely generated for each player. From that description alone, it certainly draws some parallels to what Hello Games has achieved with No Man’s Sky and what it’s looking to do with its upcoming multiplayer game, Light No Fire.
The goal is for Artemis to be highly moddable and driven by player-created content. When it was last talked about in any great detail back in 2022, PlayerUnknown also said that Artemis would include blockchain technology to give its player-generated content and procedural worlds unique ownership. In all the information I’ve been sent ahead of today’s announcement, there was no mention of web3 elements at all for Preface, Prologue, or Artemis, but I’ve reached out for comment to see if it’s still a core focus of PlayerUnknown Productions’ work.
Greene describes the path to Project Artemis as being a “five or ten year journey,” so we’re not going to see it any time soon. However, we can start to test and experience certain elements of it.
Today’s free tech demo, Preface, is the first small step. It is basically an early test of PlayerUnknown Productions’ in-house Melba engine and will let you generate. Described as a “simple experiment” it will let you jump into an Earth-sized planet that is generating different biomes, with a few basic tools that will let you explore it. The studio will be collecting data and your feedback to see what’s working well and what needs improvement in order to further hone Melba. You can head to Steam and download it right now if you want to play around with it.
Prologue, meanwhile, is closer to being an actual game. Initially it was being built in Unity, but was switched to Unreal Engine during development. It drops you into a newly-generated 8×8 map “every time you press play” and will have a standard survival game loop with the objective of getting from one side of the map to the other. There will be dynamic, challenging weather throughout your journey which can actually change the nature of the terrain – for example, heavy rainfall can cause some surfaces to become slippery or see small streams begin to form. In the most extreme instances, you’ll need to quickly find some shelter, and you’ll also be foraging for food and resources.
Prologue: Go Wayback is set to launch in early access in the second quarter of 2025, which means it should arrive in either April, May, or June.
Prologue is the first in this trio of games that PlayerUnknown Productions plans to release in the build-up to Project Artemis, but at the moment we don’t know which features they will focus on for testing or when they’ll arrive.
For more ambitious and enormous titles, head on over to our lists of the best open-world games and best sandbox games.
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